Sustaining Cities

Urban Policies, Practices, and Perceptions

Linda Krause

Publication Year: 2012

What has happened to cities after the global economic recession? Sustaining Cities answers this question by explaining how failed governmental policies contributed to urban problems and offering best practices for solving them.From social scientists and urban planners to architects and literary and film critics, the authors of this unique collection suggest real responses to this crisis. Could the drastic declines in housing markets have been avoided? Yes, if we reframe our housing values. Do you want to attract corporate investment to your town? You might want to think twice about doing so. The extinction of the “Celtic Tiger” may be charted in statistics, but the response in popular Irish mystery novels is much more compelling. China, while not immune to market vicissitudes, still booms, but at a considerable cost to its urban identities.Whether constructing a sustainable social framework for Mexican mega-cities or a neighborhood in London, these nine essays consider some strikingly similar strategies. And perhaps, as the contributors suggest, it’s time to look beyond the usual boundaries of urban, suburban, and exurban to forge new links among these communities that will benefit all citizens. Accessible to anyone with an interest in how cities cope today, Sustaining Cities presents a cautionary tale with a hopeful ending.

Title Series Information

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

This volume would not have been possible without the support
and encouragement of many individuals. In April 2009 Patrice
Petro and I organized an international conference, “Sustaining
Cities: Urban Lost and Found,” which was held at the University of...

Introduction

In one of my favorite Gary Larson cartoons, a distant mushroom
cloud looms and cars jam the street as people flee the conflagration.
Unfazed, a dog focuses on what’s in front of his nose. “And then
Jake saw something that captured his attention.” From my...

Part I. Urban Politics: Market Rules

Sustainable City: Crisis and Opportunity in Mexico

During the last two or three decades, urban theories mainly have
been directed toward analyzing the impact globalization has had
in the territory being studied, and highlighting issues of squatter
settlements, urban poverty, and environmental deterioration. As has...

Hostage Cities: Unsustainable Competition for Corporate Investment

Upping the ante are major employers like Manpower, GE
Healthcare, and Astronautics that can threaten to relocate and
then play places against each other. The winning locality gets the
company, certainly, but the competitive pressures hike up the price...

3. Reframing Housing Value

Housing is fundamental to sustaining the quality of our cities: how
we conceive, craft, conserve, and transform our residential communities
shapes the health and vitality of our civic realm. Yet how we
characterize and value housing in this country has been parochial...

Part II. Urban Practices: Connecting Communities

4. Notes Toward a History of Agrarian Urbanism

The agrarian and the urban are two categories of thought that have
more often than not been opposed to one another. Across many disciplines,
and for many centuries, the city and the country have been
called upon to define each other through a binary opposition...

5. The Art of Place-Making

Many people today, throughout the world, seem to feel that any
place, be it city or neighborhood, should have its own distinctive
character, its own place identity. In an ever globalizing world, once
regionally inflected built form—the kind of environment that...

Part III. Urban Perceptions: Tigers, Tricksters, and Other Urban Legends

7. Chinese Cities: Design and Disappearance

As a way of “envisioning the urban,” let us, first, list six characteristics
of the Chinese city today found almost everywhere. The first
characteristic is a certain operatic quality. In the Chinese Sichuan
Opera, there is a secret technique known as “changing face,” or...

8. From "The Dead" to the Dead: The Disposable Bodies and Disposable Culture of Celtic Tiger Noir

Detective Carl McCadden is a lonely man. His wife has just left him.
“‘I felt like a case you’d solved,’” she explains. “‘I was interesting
once. Years ago.’” McCadden’s mood is black. He’s “calmly, almost
contentedly, waiting to hit the bottom.” It is in the midst of this...

In the opening scene of Ridley Scott’s American Gangster (2007),
crime boss Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson takes his protégé, Frank
Lucas, to a newly opened big-box electronics store on 125th Street.
Johnson uses the occasion to bemoan the changes in the community...

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